Method for all-sky searches of continuous gravitational wave signals using the frequency-Hough transform

Understand

In this paper we present a hierarchical data analysis pipeline for all-sky searches of continuous gravitational wave signals, like those emitted by spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to the rotation axis, with unknown position, rotational frequency and spin-down.

• The core of the pipeline is an incoherent step based on a particularly efficient implementation of the Hough transform, that we call frequency-Hough, that maps the data time-frequency plane to the source frequency/spin-down plane for each fixed direction in the sky.
• Theoretical ROCs and sensitivity curves are computed and the dependency on various thresholds is discussed.
• A comparison of the sensitivity loss with respect to an "optimal" method is also presented.